The Do’s and Don’ts of SMS Marketing in Retail Business Sector

There is no question about the fact that SMS marketing is one of the most reliable and successful modes of marketing communication. Being permission-based, text marketing offers a golden opportunity for business marketers to keep in touch with the most prospective consumers and share the most vital business information and offers with them on time.

There are many reasons why you should consider SMS marketing as a primary mode of your marketing communication strategy like:

SMS is the most budget-friendly mode of information sharing. You can now send text messages at around 2 cents per message, and many of the value-added packages offer SMS sending for free.

There are many SMS marketing software and tools available, which make content creation and bulk messaging to the mobile numbers in the database easier and instant.

SMS can surely hit the mark, and the recipients open an estimate 97% of the messages, and about 90% of messages are read within 2 minutes of receipt.

Another study shows that close to 19% of the recipients tend to clink on the links they get through SMS whereas the click-through rate of email marketing is as low as 4.2% now.

SMS has a high potential for generating results also like 30% of the SMS campaigns score an average response rate of 30% and the same for emails is just 4%.

However, to enjoy these benefits, you have to be very careful and disciplined in terms of devising SMS marketing campaigns. There are many rules to follow and a lot of don’s and don’ts for the marketers to be aware of. Let’s explore a few.

Rule #1 – Share valuable offers through SMS

Remember the fact that your consumers opt-in for your SMS messages to get something valuable. So, always be keen to provide them something of value while planning SMS marketing content. Ensure that you offer something which is hard to resist. While preparing SMS offers, put yourself in the recipient’s shoes and understand what they are longing for the most. They don’t want to receive any worthless offers, with which the very next thing you have to expect is them opting out.

Rule #2 – Be concise

The best approach to SMS content is to start with what you offer. With a limitation of 160 letters, you have to be concise and right to the point with text content. Remember, your audience is also busy people, and they don’t want to waste time to read through your complicated content. Just cut to the chase and reach to everyone with the exact message you want to share.

If you find it difficult to share it with the text limit, invite their attention to a landing page or supplement your SMS with an email message with more details. If it’s an offer, then try to place it at the very beginning of your message to grab instant attention.

Rule #3 – Give the feel of exclusivity

The feel of exclusivity is irresistible to anyone. So, to make the most out of your text marketing campaigns, make sure that your offers are felt to be exclusive to the recipient who reads it. Give a special feel to your audience and also put in the sense of urgency to leverage the benefit of this exclusivity.

If something which is available to all is offered to someone, they don’t tend to value it much. So, winning a sale through an SMS is more about reassuring that they are very special for you to give off what you offer.

The DO’s and DON’Ts of SMS

There are specific do’s and don’ts which marketers used to follow from time to time. When it comes to SMS marketing also, there are certain do’s and don’ts to bring out the best results. Here, we are trying to help you out with some do’s and don’ts of SMS marketing to help you out.

We are putting it forth with the needs of retail marketers in mind. This is not an exhaustive list; however, we have listed the major points, which apply to all.

SMS marketing DO’s for the retail sector

Segment: Segment your SMS database into various sub-categories based on the needs and preferences of the target audience. This will help you run more targeted SMS campaigns for better results.

Include a call to action: Always include some call to action, which will give a clear idea to the recipients on what step next to avail the exclusive offer.

Include a link: Try to include a land page of website URL in the SMS text, which will give the customer a feel or a real message from the authentic brand and also gain an opportunity for to get them landed on to your website.

Follow up: An ideal approach to get more responses is by supplementing your first SMS with a follow-up message. Just send this a few days after the primary message as an alert or a notification of losing its exclusivity for the recipient.

SMS marketing DON’Ts for retail

Pester: Never bombard the text inbox of your customers with a huge number of SMS just for the reason that they have opted in for your SMS marketing messages. Such an approach may instantly put off your loyal customers.

Send to random customers: If a customer hasn’t opted in or unsubscribed to your SMS messages, never send them further messages, which are illegal and may land you on trouble.

Use local slang: Remember it’s a text message and customers may not understand the spoken slang in its real meaning while reading.

Send infrequently: Similar to not sending frequently, and you shouldn’t be infrequent and random too. By not sending any content for many months, people may not bother to go through your content when they get unexpectedly after forgetting your brand. Moreover, being infrequent may also annoy them. So, try to be consistent with your SMS campaigns and always be there in the minds of people.

Final Words

Now that you know the basic rules of SMS marketing and essential do’s and don’ts of planning SMS marketing campaigns try to make use of these in the best interest of your business marketing and reap better results.

This article is written by Andrew Thompson. He is an experienced blogger who has written articles for several renowned blogs and websites about various uses of social media to engineer more business traffic on business websites. You can visit https://simpletexting.com. Follow him: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn.

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